


dangerous (to live like this)

by ZenzaNightwing



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Depression, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Juno Steel Needs a Hug, Juno Steel is in Love, Juno-typical depression, M/M, Metaphors, Other, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Rita Appreciation (Penumbra Podcast), Rita is a Good Friend (Penumbra Podcast), Rita is also Hyperion City, Suicidal Ideation, because I said so, give that nice lady a hug and some therapy, it's just canon and a few creative liberties tossed in for color, just out the wazoo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-02
Updated: 2020-03-02
Packaged: 2021-02-28 01:00:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22985203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ZenzaNightwing/pseuds/ZenzaNightwing
Summary: Here is how Juno Steel falls in love:He carves the air between them into lightning with those sharp canines of his and says, “Hello, Juno.”He leans forward ever so slightly, as if he feels the same inevitable gravity that tugs the both of them together, monster and king, cat and cuckoo.“It’s been a while.”-Hyperion City always did love a good tragedy, but more than that, it loved a good love story.
Relationships: Buddy Aurinko/Vespa, Peter Nureyev/Juno Steel, Rita & Juno Steel
Comments: 28
Kudos: 150





	dangerous (to live like this)

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Dangerous by KOLARS.
> 
> I listened to this whole podcast this week. Sorta want to just wrap Juno up in a blanket and make sure that lady's okay, but the brain didn't get the memo so now I've got a mixed bag of hurt and slightly-non-hurt.

There’s a ghost in the back of Juno’s head- one that’s been there since he was born, maybe, or maybe since when mom went downhill and didn’t stop until she’d dragged the sun down with her to hell. It presses heavy on his skin, on his head, on his veins and his virtues until they’re pressed dry and withering into rust and dust the same color as martian soil.

There’s a ghost in the back of Juno’s head, and it’s the thing that howls in agreement when the words _little monster_ flutter through his brain like so many bullets and yet snarls, because he is not little, not anymore. He has grown up big and strong with so many teeth and claws and sharp edges and death trailing his shadow that he kills everything that gets close to touching him, destroys them and carves out their soul before he goes scampering back into a corner to feel sorry for himself.

There is a ghost in the back of Juno’s head, and it’s the thing that chants names and deeds and cutting words back at him until the guilt from everything makes him want to shred his own skin off of his body, until he pulls the little monster up onto a barstool and begs for something to steal away the deep horrors that are within him. Annie Wire. Benzaiten Steel. Sarah Steel. All gore on his hands, all the regret pumping through the pressed, dried out flowers of his arteries.

There is a ghost in the back of Juno’s head, and it only stops crushing him when he runs, when he hurts, when he snarls and says a quippy remark followed by a blaster shot. He doesn’t know if it's quiet because he sated it, or because he became it. He doesn’t know. And there are some things even an investigator shouldn’t investigate.

-

Rita smiles with a jagged edge. It’s the most curious thing about her.

Every day she laughs with a giggle and snort, with a gentle laziness that speaks of late nights and, on anyone else, a dark alleyway filled with smoke and whispers and passed bills. She talks rapid-fire about whatever crosses her mind as her fingers follow the same beat on her keyboard, like a gang war breaking out in a distant basement. She’s sweet and bubbly, like a mixed drink in a seedy bar and the cotton candy fizz of a vending machine soda. There’s such tender, delightful violence in every one of her gestures. Gentle viciousness.

Her eyes are always covered with glasses, but almost never the same pair. Cheap sunglasses from novelty shops with cheesy slogans on the edges, with plastic cats and flamingos curled around the frames and monkeys hanging from the arms. Cheap prescriptions that never seem to have the same thickness in the glass, or kaleidoscope goggles that she never has a problem seeing out of. On some days, though, she wears the same cat-eye glasses with lenses thick enough to choke on, that magnify her eyes impossibly wide until they seem to stare right through whatever she looks at. She has heterochromia, but every time Juno sees her eyes they seem to be a different color from the last time.

Everything she wears is a wild mess of pastels and threadbare sweaters. It looks like she went through a thrift store once, when she was twelve, and then again in her twenties with a blindfold on. She wears the same silver pair of suspenders with everything, though, as tall and demanding as the highscrapers looming over the city, snapped to skirts and pants and, somewhat uselessly, on rompers and overalls. She wears the same pair of scuffed, doodled on high tops every day, no matter what, and the same gauzy earrings that remind Juno of smog in the sky and a Martian sandstorm.

Juno’s done some snooping before- force of habit- and she has nice things in her closet. Things that she couldn’t buy on her paycheck. A few cheesily glamorous things thrown on top, in sequins and stardust and theatricality, begging him to look no further. Deeper in her closet, though, there are proper suits and slit-legged dresses, combat boots and strappy heels and a jewelry box that could buy a small moon. Secrets hidden in the backrooms.

She pushes five feet if she’s lucky, and applies chapstick with pianist’s fingers at odds with the rest of her portly figure. Her hair is stuck in elaborately braided constructs every day, and she dyes it persistently. From the day he met her, it has always been a pale, nearly translucent blue that made it look like part of the dome and a ghost teamed up to eat her head. When a bad sandstorm comes in, though, or Juno leaves on a case that takes him out of Hyperion for however briefly he can bear it, her roots creep in. Alarmingly bright orange and red and pink all melded together and emerging from her scalp in something that cannot possibly be her natural hair color. It burns like a fire against the reddish-brown soil of her skin.

But when Rita smiles, it is not gentle. Not in the slightest. It’s a rapid baring of teeth, something that on any other planet would be a snarl, would be a threat. It looks at home on her face, as round-cheeked and cheery as she works to make herself. It looks at home in these streets.

On her good days, when she simply watches her streams and lazes about the station, and then the office, or when she invites Juno over for a stream or a drink or a laugh, when the newsdays are slow and even the mobsters seem to have taken a day off, her smile is bright and shining like a thousand sleepless windows, and her teeth are perfectly straight.

On the days he comes struggling into Rita’s car or through the office window with a fresh scar aching to bind his flesh to this city once more, when the streets echo distantly with laser fire and Rita sounds second away from snapping and doing something nasty with that keyboard of hers, when the whole of the city smells blood and wants a show, her smile looks just a little bit strained- and though it took Juno a long time to see, and a longer time to accept, her canines are as sharp as plasma blades and somehow, impossibly, her lower teeth are a perfect match for Hyperion City’s skyline.

Juno stopped asking for Rita’s last name a long time ago. He never bothered to ask for her real name, either.

He has the feeling it would sound like the wails he made the second he was born into this city. The wails of sirens and mourners and new life. The empty, echoing alleys, and the bright, bustling streets. Like liquor and deadly sunshine. Like the imperceptible hum of the dome. Like the buzz of comms ringing and spacecraft taking flight and blaster fire.

(“Y’know, Mistah Steel,” Rita had said once, conversationally, “all of this reminds me of a stream I saw once!”

Juno, struggling his way through the haze of a drug some two-bit gangster had used as a last resort, only hummed and twisted himself to bury deeper into his shitty couch cushions and the safety of Rita’s lap. Her hands didn’t stop combing through the hair that he sheared short every month so he stopped seeing Benten in the mirror.

“There’s this big ol’ city and this one lady who’s fighting everyday to keep it safe and there’s this big plot about the lady’s childhood and the way it made him so desperate to save anything that the second he escaped from his house he swore his whole life to the city and the city came to life! And she hangs out with him as this spunky little spitfire named… Marge! And then they get into all of this trouble- but no one ever actually says anything about Marge being the city! It’s all subtext! It’s just a theory, really, actually, you know, but I really like it, I think it’s cute and fun, and- oh! I found some proof once, too- the lady leaves the city some of the time, but Marge never does- except that they leave _together_ at the end of season five, after the city gets taken apart by this alien overlord and I think it’s real sweet but _also-”_

Juno passed out right about then.)

-

There’s a ghost in Juno Steel’s home, too. Both homes, actually: the one that he pays rent on and the one Rita holds the lease for. A ghost with sharp features and a fox’s teeth, with lips like silk and the deft hands of a master thief. Haunting him through the threshold of his windowsill, haunting him through hell and high waters, and then haunting him through the front door to his apartment, and back out in handcuffs.

There’s a ghost with dark glasses and dark suits and cherry red lips and a cologne that smells like laser fire and funeral roses. He calls himself a king, a king of fragile shards and transparency.

There’s a ghost with soft eyes and his collar half-turned-up and smudged lipstick and the cool bite of metal around his wrists. That ghost leaves behind an invitation, signed in ink and vulnerability and a name that reminds Juno of disciples and grace and bird bones.

That ghost stays, even though he doesn’t. Even though he goes just down the road to Mercury and flies off into the blue-tinted sunset, even though he leaves behind only this shed feather of parchment with a secret signed on the bottom, he remains in that corner of Juno’s apartment.

He stays in the sharp softness of his smile, in his bold hesitations, in the places where his feet had shifted against the floorboards, in the worn paper of his note that Juno nearly turns into Icarus to hold onto, and in the way that his smell lingers and waits and then flutters out of the windows Juno has been so careful to keep shut.

He comes back in the gentle darkness, in the proud tilt of his chin that bares his throat and the way the city lights from Juno’s window turn into a crown and a halo around his dark hair.

He comes back, to this creature with withered veins and bitterness, to the den of that little monster that breaks everything it touches, with rose-tinted glasses and that knife of a smile as his only weapons.

But the little monster backs down as soon as he sees that hollow-boned king, because he feels like death and the hunt and sweet reckoning.

Because he carves the air between them into lightning with those sharp canines of his and says, “Hello, Juno.”

Because he leans forward ever so slightly, as if he feels the same inevitable gravity that tugs the both of them together, monster and king, cat and cuckoo.

“It’s been a while.”

-

He will become a ghost. A specter, always haunting and watching and unable to move an inch as Miasma carves his sanity out slowly. As he tears his own head apart so that the lightning doesn’t take Nureyev’s.

He will become a ghost as he scrapes the blood from his cheeks and feels gentle fingers soothe the skin and deftly scrub it with the same softness that those arms hold him in his sleep. As he sinks into the dark corners of his dark cell with his dark hair smoothed over by a thief’s hands.

As he reaches out to a distant past and a distant planet and a child that was made into myth, and watches the places in which the Angel of Brahma fits into the shadow of the hollow-boned king of roses.

The places in which Nureyev is holy, beneath his efforts to bloody his hands. The saint that is the reason the sinner is so determined to go to hell.

As Juno is left alone. Left behind. With a promise.

It could be forever. It could be a few hours. It could be a few days. Who’s to say? 

Not this ghost that has the name of a goddess, no. Not this ghost that cries blood as often as he does tears.

Those few days are the most difficult ones.

But then the time comes when the world must be saved, and it is an angel and a ghost of a little monster against one genocidal behemoth and her child birthing a new era with a cracked eggshell.

The time comes, and that little monster realizes he is done outrunning that ghost in his skull, and that horrible pressure, and the justice he’s half-blind to.

He’s done running.

He’s done.

Just… so _done_ with every nightmare and every scar and every gasping breath he takes in.

He shuts the door behind the angel and smiles, because now he can finally rest. Now he can finally die and not feel guilty about it. A moral suicide. An acceptable way to take that running leap he has never felt he deserved. Not because he is better than it, but because Benzaiten deserved someone with his face out there doing good for all of the good he could never do.

Here is that good. Here is all of the pain that Juno has, ready to go supernova.

Here is the supernova.

And here is the waking up, as Nureyev screams from behind the airlock. Here is the dull realization that he is still alive. That the little monster doesn’t get to go gentle into that good night. That the Martians selfishly kept their own suicide from him.

Here is the way that the horizon calls him home. Back to where the dome sticks to his ghost like a second skin, where there is beauty and ugliness in equal measure.

Here is the way he falls in love: recklessly, screaming, ready to die, craving to trust, fingers laced in fingers, lips that were like silk but now taste of desperation, the tall figure of the king coiled so elegantly in the driver’s seat and in his blind spot and in a Hyperion City hotel bed, the two fools entwined and hoping for a higher horizon.

And here is the way that he ruins it: recklessly, silently, craving to die, not trusting his own traitorous fingers to rest against those lips and against the crown of the king’s head and follow him into the stars, the soft call of his name forcibly blocked out by the chatter of the city he has sworn himself to and the close of the hotel door.

He is a little monster, and he breaks everything into rubble with a touch. He will break Nureyev if he keeps wanting him. If he keeps craving what he cannot be allowed to have. Even if Nureyev thinks he wants this, he’ll either tire of the novelty or get broken before he can. Juno will kill that beautiful thing he’s been allowed. He will kill that man he has let himself love.

He goes back to his office, and he gets drunk.

Somewhere, a man with a thousand names wakes up alone and breaks down. He isn’t a ghost anymore, even though he wants to be now. He was an Angel once, and he is again, and the man that prayed to this Lucifer is gone from the hotel room. He only whispers one name as he packs up his things and packs up his heart and leaves the pieces too shattered to sweep up imbedded in the carpet, and it is only to place in its own mental folder and file it away.

Somewhere, a lady with one name wakes up alone and stares at the ceiling. He is a ghost, and a monster, and he will hurt and hurt and hurt and bleed everyone dry if they stay around for long enough. He whispers a litany of names, a steady chant, a steady prayer to his god of grief. Annie Wire. Benzaiten Steel. Sarah Steel. Miasma. Peter Nureyev.

The world gets a little bigger, a little meaner.

A little lonelier.

-

Rita has a swathe of orange an inch thick the first day she comes back into the office, burning and blazing and cutting through the placid paleness of her hair, far too long for how long he’d been gone. She hugs him, and looks up at his eye for a long while, and then nods and goes off on one of her endless tangents without another word.

She doesn’t get it retouched until after the Piranha. Until after Juno wakes up and finds something to live for. Until he goes back out into the city and breathes it back in and finds his legs and something to start outrunning again and a reason to start doing good again.

She doesn’t like his new eye though. She doesn’t say anything about it. But he can tell.

She makes him a bracelet instead, soft and woven through with a thousand shades of blue, to match the THEIA. To stake her own claim.

He has never been afraid that the little monster in him will break Rita. He has been in this city since he was born. He was made by it. He doubts he can harm it anymore than it already has been.

-

Then, of course, his world ends, as it always does. Heralded by the king himself in his dreams. By the thing in his eye socket that will try to hollow him out again. By the empty planes of the Martian desert. By the crackle of a laser set to kill, and a thousand people cheering. By trying to do good again.

He wasn’t made to do good. He was made to be leashed, so that all of his bad, all of his hurt, all of the stuff that reminds him of that woman with a gun and a missing pill bottle goes somewhere it has a use.

He’s had a lot of bad luck leashing himself to people that put his hurt in all of the wrong places. That give him more to work with the next time he tightens his collar and gives himself over to another.

So he picks himself up from the sand, tightens Rita’s bracelet, and starts walking.

-

He knows that he should be dead, of course. No one survives this long out in the Martian desert, in thin civilian clothing, under the harsh sun and unshielded dirt, with radiation seeping into their skin and cooking them inside out.

He doesn’t know how long it is until that man finds him, but he knows that it would be too late for anyone else.

And, later, when he looks down at Rita’s bracelet, studiously trying to ignore the tears in his eyes and the way that Buddy and Vespa look at each other like their sharp edges don’t matter and their broken pieces don’t scrape and like all of their shrapnel are weapons they can wield against a world that is big and mean, _together-_

There will be a vast swathe of it, among the varied depths of the blues, that had reminded him of Rita’s hair. Of the color of the dome that surrounds Hyperion.

And it will be as bright and orange and dangerously beautiful as the Martian sunset, unfettered.

He looks back at Buddy, scarred and hurt and broken by her devotion, but still whole, and still sound. He looks to the horizon, that ate up her dedication and chewed it up and mulled it over, as it scarred her but left her sane, and finally gave her back her wife.

Rita always did love a good tragedy, but more than that, she loved a love story.

-

He is not a monster. He is not a monster. And he has met one of his ghosts and laughed with him and cried with him and torn off a thousand masks from everyone else and from himself and he feels so raw and empty and-

And fucking _happy._

He hates, right now, hates Jack Takano, and hates Ramses O’Flaherty, and hates whatever other name he’s used to justify himself. He hates Sarah Steel, but he has never truly stopped.

He still hates himself, a little bit. But he won’t run from it, this time. He won’t drown in it either.

He’s going to keep moving, even if it stiffens up his joints and makes him wish he never started, he is going to keep moving, but he will not be outrunning his own head, his own dread, his own dead eyes in the mirror that ask him if he really wants to wake up in the morning.

He is going to press on, and see the light again.

And he is going to be _happy._

And, sure, he has his sharp edges, and he can hurt people around him as easily as anything, and he probably won’t ever stop making mistakes that hurt other people, but he is not a monster. He can choose to try being better. He can choose to do good, not just for everyone else, but for himself.

-

Rita meets him in the sewers.

Her hair is in one high braided bun, with the sunset bursting through her roots almost two inches. She looks tired. Her suspenders have some sludge on them, and her shoes aren’t muck-free either. She looks a little beaten down, a little angry, a little righteous, and a lot Rita.

“Protecting you, Mistah Steel, is a full time job,” Rita says softly. “I ain’t even gettin’ paid for most of it. And now it’s my only job.”

Juno snorts. “Lost your gig as Hyperion incarnate?”

She smiles, jagged and sharp, and her canines are knives, but the bottom row of her teeth are perfectly straight. “This city lost me, not the other way around, boss.” She twirls her comms with a flick of her wrist and a small squeak as she nearly drops it into the sewer water. “Let’s go take it back.”

-

THEIA falls. Falls and dies.

And Rita watches it with salmon dust on her fingers and graffiti littering her shoes and highscrapers running up her chest and eyes that look like Phobos and Deimos, Fear and Fright, glimmering as electricity sparks and Juno Steel tears himself free of his leash.

But Hyperion-City-as-it-was is fallen and dead as well. It is no longer the same. It no longer fits in her smile like it had before, or in the hangers of her closet and her jewelry box.

Rita will not change to match it. She is stubborn like that. She doesn’t want to leave, either, because she’s stubborn like that.

But she has her boss, and he’s finally done some of that growing up he’s been putting off for so long. She’s very proud of him.

She has her boss, and he doesn’t want to stay, but he’s still sacrificial enough to stay if she asks him to, and that just won’t do either.

She’s spent a while doing good. It’s high time she got around to doing something… a little less than that. It’s in her nature, after all. Then again, her nature is whatever she damn well pleases nowadays.

She lets her roots grow out. Out from the thin blue protection of the dome and into the raw aggression of a Martian sunset. Her braids are two tones, now, when she piles them on top of her head. Security and savagery.

She hopes her new coworkers will like it.

-

Juno Steel has exorcised a lot of his ghosts recently. Has finally let them rest, lessened the pressure on the back of his skull and freed the dead.

But here is how Juno Steel falls in love: hacking and spitting out Martian dust, watching his new life spread out in front of him, ready to run towards something and not just away from himself, the green of a car speaking like new beginnings, long legs and slim heels, loose shirts and dark hair and a golden circlet over sharp eyebrows.

And he knows, instantly, that he is a goner.

Because he has done this song and dance before, and he stepped out after the waltz, but he’s been doing his best to make Benzaiten proud, recently.

Because Juno has always loved dangerous things - with the exception of himself, though he’s working on it - and he’s certainly not going to stop today.

Because the ghost in front of him breathes in one slow inhale and exhale, betraying the life that lives inside of his skin with a million faces and twice the names, the thrum of a pulse that separates every instant from the next, the thin webs of scars from Miasma’s electricity snaking up those pale forearms.

Because his hands flex against the hood of the RUBY7 with a careful click of those claws and an imperceptible tremble and the edge of a tomorrow that is and isn’t and shall be once more when they finally stop pretending they haven’t given half of their souls to each other.

Because he is beautiful and dangerous and unbelievably strong, and Juno is ready, now, to believe that he, himself, is capable of being loved, that he is capable of not destroying everyone he touches.

Because with one fragile second of eye contact, Juno feels his heart beating, feels his veins reviving and shoving off the ghosts that press them into Lichtenberg figures beneath his flesh, and he wants to live more than he ever has in his whole life. 

Because he carves the air between them into lightning with those sharp canines of his and says, “Hello, Juno.”

Because he leans forward ever so slightly, as if he feels the same inevitable gravity that tugs the both of them together, private eye and thief, martyr and angel, guardian and king, Juno and Peter, Steel and Nureyev.

“It’s been a while.”


End file.
